to spoil it. The drumming, the flag-waving, and the noise of bugles
were still astir in his imagination, but the river had called something
else to life behind their glamour. It did not occur to him to call it
love of country, yet that was what it was.

His walk brought him out in the end by the Houses of Parliament, and he
found himself in the midst of a large crowd. It swayed and surged now
this way and now that, as is the way of crowds. The outskirts of it
reached right up to and around Trafalgar Square. When Dick had fought
his way up Parliament Street he could see a mass of people moving about
the National Gallery, and right above them Nelson's statue stood out
black against the sky.

"If they want war, these bally Germans," someone in the crowd suddenly
shouted in a very hoarse and beery voice, "let's give it them."

"Yes, by God!" another answered. "Good old England, let's stand by our
word."

"We have got men behind the guns," declaimed a third.

But such words were only as the foam thrown up by a great sea; the
multitude did no real shouting, the spirit that moved them was too
earnest for that. There were women among the crowd, their eager, excited
faces caught Dick's attention. Some were crying hysterically, but most
of them faced the matter in the same way that their menkind did. Dick
could find no words to describe the curious feeling which gripped him,
but he knew himself one of this vast multitude, all thinking the same
thoughts, all answering to the same heart-beats. It was as if the
meaning of the word citizen had suddenly been made clear to his heart.

He moved with the shifting of the crowd as far as Trafalgar Square, and
here some of the intense seriousness of the strain was broken, for
round and about the stately lions of Nelson's statue a noisy battle was
raging. Several Peace parties, decked with banners inscribed "No War"
and "Let us have peace," were coming in for a very rough five minutes at
the hands of the crowd. Rather to his own surprise Dick found himself
partaking in the battle, with a sense of jubilant pride in his prowess
to hit out. He had a German as his opponent, which was a stroke of luck
in itself, but in a calmer moment which followed on the arrival of the
police, he thought to himself that even that was hardly an excuse for
hitting a man who was desirous of keeping the world's peace. Still the
incident had exhilarated him, he was more than ever a part of the crowd,
and he w